[PATCH] x86/mm: drop 4MB restriction on minimal NUMA node size

From: Mike Rapoport (IBM)
Date: Wed Feb 15 2023 - 04:12:18 EST


Qi Zheng reports crashes in a production environment and provides a
simplified example as a reproducer:

For example, if we use qemu to start a two NUMA node kernel,
one of the nodes has 2M memory (less than NODE_MIN_SIZE),
and the other node has 2G, then we will encounter the
following panic:

[ 0.149844] BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000
[ 0.150783] #PF: supervisor write access in kernel mode
[ 0.151488] #PF: error_code(0x0002) - not-present page
<...>
[ 0.156056] RIP: 0010:_raw_spin_lock_irqsave+0x22/0x40
<...>
[ 0.169781] Call Trace:
[ 0.170159] <TASK>
[ 0.170448] deactivate_slab+0x187/0x3c0
[ 0.171031] ? bootstrap+0x1b/0x10e
[ 0.171559] ? preempt_count_sub+0x9/0xa0
[ 0.172145] ? kmem_cache_alloc+0x12c/0x440
[ 0.172735] ? bootstrap+0x1b/0x10e
[ 0.173236] bootstrap+0x6b/0x10e
[ 0.173720] kmem_cache_init+0x10a/0x188
[ 0.174240] start_kernel+0x415/0x6ac
[ 0.174738] secondary_startup_64_no_verify+0xe0/0xeb
[ 0.175417] </TASK>
[ 0.175713] Modules linked in:
[ 0.176117] CR2: 0000000000000000

The crashes happen because of inconsistency between nodemask that has
nodes with less than 4MB as memoryless and the actual memory fed into
core mm.

The commit 9391a3f9c7f1 ("[PATCH] x86_64: Clear more state when ignoring
empty node in SRAT parsing") that introduced minimal size of a NUMA node
does not explain why a node size cannot be less than 4MB and what boot
failures this restriction might fix.

Since then a lot has changed and core mm won't confuse badly about small
node sizes.

Drop the limitation for the minimal node size.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20230212110305.93670-1-zhengqi.arch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Signed-off-by: Mike Rapoport (IBM) <rppt@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
arch/x86/include/asm/numa.h | 7 -------
arch/x86/mm/numa.c | 7 -------
2 files changed, 14 deletions(-)

diff --git a/arch/x86/include/asm/numa.h b/arch/x86/include/asm/numa.h
index e3bae2b60a0d..ef2844d69173 100644
--- a/arch/x86/include/asm/numa.h
+++ b/arch/x86/include/asm/numa.h
@@ -12,13 +12,6 @@

#define NR_NODE_MEMBLKS (MAX_NUMNODES*2)

-/*
- * Too small node sizes may confuse the VM badly. Usually they
- * result from BIOS bugs. So dont recognize nodes as standalone
- * NUMA entities that have less than this amount of RAM listed:
- */
-#define NODE_MIN_SIZE (4*1024*1024)
-
extern int numa_off;

/*
diff --git a/arch/x86/mm/numa.c b/arch/x86/mm/numa.c
index 2aadb2019b4f..55e3d895f15c 100644
--- a/arch/x86/mm/numa.c
+++ b/arch/x86/mm/numa.c
@@ -601,13 +601,6 @@ static int __init numa_register_memblks(struct numa_meminfo *mi)
if (start >= end)
continue;

- /*
- * Don't confuse VM with a node that doesn't have the
- * minimum amount of memory:
- */
- if (end && (end - start) < NODE_MIN_SIZE)
- continue;
-
alloc_node_data(nid);
}

--
2.35.1


> --
> Michal Hocko
> SUSE Labs

--
Sincerely yours,
Mike.